Does licensure still matter if the profession can't fill 70,000 open roles by 2032?
The plain answer
Yes, and it matters more now than it has in decades, but not for the reason most DVMs think. Licensure isn't just malpractice cover or a credential to hang. It's the legal boundary that defines who can diagnose, prescribe, and bill as a veterinarian, and that boundary is about to face more political pressure than it has since the profession formalized state boards.
The American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges estimates the U.S. will need roughly 70,000 new veterinarians by 2032 to address acute shortages in rural, food animal, and public health roles. Veterinary student enrollment has reportedly increased more than 35 percent over the past decade, but growth in the number of students is not the only sign of a healthy talent pipeline, and it won't close the gap fast enough to keep legislators from looking for workarounds.
The North American Veterinary Licensing Examination is the profession's independent safeguard. It builds public trust by ensuring every newly licensed veterinarian, regardless of where or how they were trained, meets a baseline standard of knowledge necessary to practice safely. It's not designed to identify the most polished clinician or future specialist, but to answer a more important question: Can this veterinarian be trusted with animal and public health?
That question is about to get asked in reverse: if we can't produce enough licensed DVMs, who else can we trust with pieces of the work?
The caveat that makes it hard
The exam itself is rigorous by design, and that rigor is both the point and the political problem. Each question is formulated by trained subject matter experts from across veterinary medicine, private practitioners, academicians, industry professionals, who represent diverse species, geographic regions, and career stages. Those experts undergo formal training in best practices for item writing before they submit a question. Items are reviewed, edited, and critiqued repeatedly by multiple trained subject matter experts from various areas of veterinary medicine. Some are rejected outright. Those that advance must be pre-tested to gather performance information before they can ever count toward a candidate's score.
Only after passing through this process can an item be eligible for inclusion as a scored question on the NAVLE. The council uses the performance information to determine how candidates interpret the question, if the question performed as intended, and if the question appropriately assesses entry-level competency.
Every NAVLE exam is built on the same published blueprint, which defines the proportion of species, diagnoses, and competencies represented on the exam. That blueprint is derived from a large-scale practice analysis that reflects a survey of thousands of practicing veterinarians across North America, designed to capture what veterinarians encounter in day-to-day practice. Exam forms are assembled using automated procedures to ensure comparable difficulty, and scores are statistically equated, so no cohort is advantaged or disadvantaged based on the specific form they receive.
This is how fairness is operationalized: not by identical questions, but by equivalent standards.
The problem is that rigor takes time, and time is the resource the profession doesn't have. Rural clinics can't wait three years for the pipeline to catch up. Food-animal practices are closing now. Public health roles are going unfilled today. That creates the political opening for scope-creep proposals, the kind the profession will likely see more of as the shortage deepens.
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What licensure actually protects
A degree reflects education, but licensure measures competence. The distinction matters because the political fight over the next few years won't be about whether vet schools are good enough, it will be about whether the competency bar licensure sets is too high given the shortage.
Standards don't just happen. They are built, tested, and maintained through intentional, ongoing work.
For the associate DVM two years out: the relief rates and comp structures that hold today depend in part on clinics needing a licensed DVM on-site for certain procedures and prescribing authority. If state-level scope requirements shift, that changes the math on what practices are willing to pay for DVM labor versus credentialed-tech labor. We'd expect downward pressure on associate comp in any market where scope expands meaningfully, though how much and how fast would depend on the specific changes each state makes.
For the owner-DVM: state-level scope fights will determine whether you can staff shortages with lower-cost labor or whether you stay locked into DVM hiring at six-figure base salaries. That sounds like a win until you realize the same legislative change that lets you delegate more also lets larger corporate groups staff a higher proportion of appointments with non-DVMs under lighter DVM supervision. The math on that staffing model likely works better at scale than it does for a three-doctor independent practice.
The NAVLE is not the culmination of veterinary education. It is a checkpoint. What truly defines the profession is what comes after: lifelong learning, ethical practice, and a commitment to excellence that goes far beyond minimum competency. But the minimum matters. It protects the public. It protects the profession.
What to watch
Rural and food-animal shortages are the wedge issue. We'd expect legislative proposals in states with large production-animal populations to surface over the next few years, framed as emergency measures to keep herds healthy and rural clinics open. Whether those proposals gain traction, and whether other states follow if one passes, will depend on whether national veterinary organizations can make the case that lowering the competency floor creates more problems than it solves.
The profession is about to have a conversation it hasn't had in a long time: what does it mean to be a veterinarian, and who gets to decide? Licensure is the answer the profession gave itself decades ago. Whether that answer holds depends on whether DVMs remember what it defends.